12 Ways to Map the Midwest

What is the Midwest? There’s been a lot of debate about this question among folks passionate about such thing. But it defies easy definition. Here are eleven ways various people have taken a crack at drawing the map.

Traditional Maps

1. The Northwest Territory

Start with the original Northwest Territory, now sometimes referred to as the Great Lakes region. This is the historic core of what we now think of as the Midwest.

Colin Woodard took this a step further and argued that there were really eleven nations in North America, which he identifies based on settlement patterns. You can see his writeup on this in an article in Tufts Alumni magazine.

Colin Woodard’s 11 Nations

Economic Definitions

Other maps try to define a region based on shared economic characteristics such as industries.

5. The Rust Belt
Here’s a map of the Rust Belt that’s floating around the I found on a website about coal communities of all places. I’m not sure exactly where it originated.

The Rust Belt

Hybrid Definitions

These maps attempt to use both shared cultural/historical and economic characteristics to define a Midwest region.

6. Richard Longworth’s Midwest

In his very important book Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism, Richard Longworth created his own bespoke definition of the Midwest. He notably excludes the southern regions of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio as extensions of the south (similar to the 9 & 11 nations map), and also the pure play Great Plains states along the western edge of the Census definition.

Joel Kotkin took a similar approach to dividing America up in Forbes magazine. His view also appears to be a hybrid of culture, economics, and history. He turns America into seven regions and three city-states (New York, LA, and Miami). The full map is too huge to blog, but an excerpt is below which you can click on to see the whole thing in a new window.

The Midwest in Kotkin’s map

Crowdsourced Maps

A couple of other people used crowdsourcing, in whole or in part, to define the Midwest

Lastly, a special surprise – a map you’ve never seen before. This was created by someone named Daniel Jarratt, who emailed it to me back in 2012. Using Chicago as the capital of the Midwest, he used IRS migration data and a statistic technique called modularity to divide the US into regions based on affinity with Chicago. Darker red means more connection to Chicago and thus in a sense more Midwest.

About Aaron M. Renn

Aaron M. Renn is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an opinion-leading urban analyst, writer, and speaker on a mission to help America’s cities thrive and find sustainable success in the 21st century. (Photo Credit: Daniel Axler)